Atos, Engineering, Orange and Telefónica, the members of the FIWARE Core Industry group, announced today the creation of the FIWARE Foundation, aiming at supporting FIWARE activities by protecting the FIWARE brand, and preserving the principles of openness, transparency and meritocracy which will work as the pillars of the FIWARE community. This represents a significant step forward in the adoption of FIWARE as the de-facto platform easing the development of IoT-enabled solutions and applications in multiple sectors and the creation of a strong open-source ecosystem.. 
The four companies who announced last year their commitment for the adoption of FIWARE in the domain of Smart Cities, are now announcing their plans to bring FIWARE to other domains like Smart Industry or Smart Agrifood. In a recent document titled "The Next Digital Revolution in Industry: the FIWARE Perspective ”, the companies stated that FIWARE has been vanguard in how Cloud, IoT, real-time context information processing and BigData analysis technologies can be integrated together to be the starting point for an emerging Digital Industry platform ecosystem, breaking down the borders for creating a digital single market.
On the other hand, the FIWARE Accelerator program has demonstrated how innovative SMEs and startups, with the right enablers like those brought by FIWARE, can build IoT-enabled solutions and introduce great improvements in business processes across several sectors.
Within the scope of Smart Cities, FIWARE continues to progress towards becoming the platform which integrates the standards of many cities around the world. The OASC (Open and Agile Smart Cities) initiative has decided to adopt it in order to facilitate the development of portable and interoperable solutions. The initiative has already gained the support from 75 cities in more than 15 different countries in 2015 and a fourth wave of cities has been announced at the Smart Cities World Congress in Puebla (Mexico), reaching a total of 89 cities in 19 countries.   This multi-country adoption underlines the importance of FIWARE as an international information hub, which is particularly relevant for sectors such as smart industry, smart cities or agrifood where there is a need to connect services across multiple territories and exchange valuable data enabled by the new wave of smart digital services. In this respect, FIWARE is Candidate as the Industry Data platform for the recently announced European Initiative: Digitizing European Industry.
FIWARE comes as an opportunity to materialize actions identified within the EU Digital Single Market Strategy as well as the collaboration with other countries and regions across the globe. The Mexico-EU collaboration on ICT or the EU-US collaboration on standardization are good examples of this.
Under the EU Digital Single Market, FIWARE will decisively contribute to the vision of Digital as a driver for growth by means of creating an open innovation-driven ecosystem where public and private organizations, including academia and research centers as well as SMEs, particularly startups, can join forces towards the creation of new digital products and services.
The FIWARE Core Industry Group are running conversations with other companies and end users willing to join the FIWARE initiative and support the FIWARE Foundation.  A FIWARE Foundation “Founders event” will be held in June 2016 in Vienna to confirm their incorporation and propose a platform for discussions and collaboration of the industry.